Dead Lagoon - 4 (13 page)

‘What was the break-in about?’

‘It happened one Sunday while they were at Mass with their mother. The house was torn apart, but nothing was taken. A neighbour saw the intruders leaving and phoned one one three, but by the time we got a boat there they were long gone. The only strange thing about it was that the Sfrisos wouldn’t co-operate. They didn’t want to pursue the matter, they said. Wouldn’t even file a complaint until I told them they had to.’

Zen nodded to show a polite interest.

‘And now one of them’s dead. Is there any suggestion of foul play?’

Valentini shrugged.

‘I didn’t see any, but it’s out of my hands. Gavagnin must have pulled some strings upstairs this time. They didn’t even bother to discuss it with me, just told me to hand over the file.’

He sighed.

‘It’s really pissed me off, I can tell you. First interesting thing happens in months and it gets pulled out from under my feet.’

He took the carving knife from Zen and wrapped it up again.

‘What was this used to do?’

Zen briefly ran through the events of the previous night. Aldo Valentini yawned loudly.

‘I’ll bet you anything you like the prints on the handle are hers.’

Zen shrugged.

‘Probably. Still, I’m going to have to put a man in the house. I don’t want her dead next time.’

‘It’d be better to get the old girl committed again. The chief isn’t going to agree to tying up personnel indefinitely to keep someone with her psychiatric record from slitting her wrists. We’re not running a nanny service, you know.’

Zen put his finger to his lips.

‘If I do that, I’ll be out of work too,’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘I only just got here, for God’s sake. I want to spin it out for a week at least.’

Valentini smiled broadly.

‘Oh well, put like that, of course, the case for ongoing police intervention becomes overwhelming. I’ll take this downstairs, then go and grab some breakfast.’

He headed for the door, shaking his head.

‘Bastards!’

Once Valentini had gone, Zen phoned the Questore’s office. Francesco Bruno, the provincial police chief, was out of town, and the call was taken by his deputy. Zen outlined the history of his involvement with the case so far and explained why he wished to post a guard inside Palazzo Zulian. The Deputy Questore at first expressed considerable doubts about this, and an even greater amazement that a Criminalpol operative had been commissioned to investigate such a comparatively insignificant case.

‘Exactly!’ Zen retorted triumphantly. ‘This woman clearly must have powerful connections to have me sent up here. It is therefore all the more essential that we do not leave ourselves open to any possible criticism. How’s it going to look if we wash our hands of the affair and then she goes and kills herself?’

The Deputy Questore speedily acknowledged the force of this argument. Armed with this authorization from on high, Zen spent the next twenty minutes punishing the internal telephone system until he had made the necessary arrangements. He then typed up a confirmation, took it down to Personnel and extracted a receipt, thereby giving the staff an interest in seeing that his orders were actually carried out.

Back at his desk, he rang
Serenissmi Viaggi
, the travel agency where Cristiana Morosini worked. He had phoned Palazzo Sisti before leaving home to pass on the fax number, but the subordinate he had spoken to then had been unable or unwilling to reveal whether or not
l’onorevole
had been successful in obtaining the material Zen wished to consult. So his disappointment at not being able to speak to Cristiana herself, who had gone out on some errand, was mitigated by the news that a fax transmission in his name had indeed arrived and was awaiting collection.

Zen grabbed his hat and coat and hurried out. The light in the corridors and stairwell seemed slightly hazy, as though the drench all around had seeped through the walls to taint the air inside as well. Somewhere below a door slammed shut and a pair of metal-tipped shoes began running along an echoing passage. Zen continued down. As he reached the landing he met a tubby, choleric man dashing up the stairs two at a time.

‘Aren’t you Enzo Gavagnin?’ said Zen.

‘Well?’ snapped the other, whirling round.

‘Aurelio Zen, Vice-Questore. We met yesterday. I’m here on secondment from the Ministry.’

Enzo Gavagnin’s eyes became smaller and more intense.

‘Excuse me! I for one have no time to chat.’

‘Oh quite,’ Zen murmured languidly. ‘Sounds like a big case you’re working on. A drowned fisherman, eh? I’ve never heard the like! Did he slip on a squid or get his waders caught in the winch?’

Gavagnin glared at him.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ he growled in dialect.

Outside, the fog was thicker than ever. Buildings loomed up like ships, towering above the narrow lanes where featureless figures slipped in and out of the clammy banks of vapour. As Zen passed on the corner, he caught sight of Aldo Valentini drowning his sorrows with a sandwich and glass of wine. For a moment he was tempted to join him, but he kept going, stopping at a bakery to buy half a loaf of olive bread. He chewed contentedly as he walked along, savouring the warm pulp of the dough and the sweet black putrefaction of the olives.

Serenissimi Viaggi
was in an alley just north of the Piazza, lined with shops selling carnival masks and costumes. A group of tourists passed by like soldiers on patrol in enemy territory, bunched for protection, cameras ready to shoot at the slightest opportunity. One of them looked at the posters in the window of the agency and frowned, momentarily disturbed by the idea that a city he thought of only as a holiday destination was offering holidays elsewhere.

Inside the small shop were two desks piled with brochures and timetables and computer equipment. One was unoccupied. An anorexically cadaverous woman with unnaturally white skin and black hair was seated behind the other. She did not look up as Zen entered.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m Cristiana’s friend. I’ve come to pick up the fax which arrived for me.’

The woman sighed mightily. She stood up and walked over to the other desk. After rummaging through the papers scattered there for some time, she returned with a large envelope which she handed to Zen, still avoiding any eye contact but fixing the half-eaten loaf in his hand with a look full of disapproval.

‘Thirty-eight thousand,’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

The woman tapped the keys of a printing calculator.

‘Fourteen pages fax reception at two thousand a page equals twenty-eight thousand, plus five thousand handling fee makes thirty-three, plus VAT at fifteen per cent four nine five oh say another five equals thirty-eight thousand in all. Do you want a receipt?’

Zen paid and shuffled out into the fog, clutching the envelope. He turned right, off the main street, away from the crowds, glancing at the shopfronts to either side. In Campo Santa Maria Formosa he found what he had been looking for: a small, cosy wine bar, almost empty at that hour. The walls were panelled with varnished laths, as though the hull of a boat had been flattened out like
pollo alla diavola
. The windows were screened by a lace curtain hanging on a rail. Brass lamps with bulbous glass shades cast patches of soft yellow light in the intimate gloom.

At the bar, a brown-flecked marble slab, three men stood discussing the merits of various models of outboard engine. Zen took a seat at a trestle table near the back of the room, facing the door. When the barman came over, he ordered some breaded crab claws and a quarter litre of white wine. He waited till the man had gone, then opened the envelope and spread the contents on the table.

The document faxed by Palazzo Sisti consisted of fourteen pages of double-spaced typing. There was no heading or other indication that the text formed part of an official report, the material having been retyped on to plain paper in order to conceal the source or to edit out any items which might have compromised friends or allies of
l’onorevole
.

Zen skimmed quickly through the report, then went back to the beginning and started again, reading more carefully and making marks and comments in the margin here and there. The first thing he learned was that the missing man’s real name was not Durridge but
He had been born in 1919 in Sarajevo, a city as notorious then, in the aftermath of the war which had been sparked off there, as it was again now that it had been abandoned to its fate by a world seemingly eager to demonstrate that it had learned nothing from the horrors of the intervening seventy-five years.

Zen casually placed the envelope over the fax sheets as the barman returned with his food and drink. He tore open one of the golden-breaded pincers, exposing the pink bone, and savoured the sweet flesh with sips of wine while he read on. When Ivan
was twenty, another European conflict engulfed his country, only this time he was able to take an active hand. Unfortunately he backed the wrong faction, and when Tito’s Communist partisans took power of the new Yugoslavia the
family were forced to make a hasty exit. They slipped across the Adriatric to Italy and thence to the United States, where Ivan changed his surname and went on to make a fortune in the trucking business.

Zen finished the last of the crab. He poured himself more wine, lit a cigarette and went back to the report. Durridge had first come to the attention of the Italian authorities in March 1988, when he had bought the
ottagono
in the lagoon and applied to the local Questura for a residence permit. Since then, according to the records of the frontier police, he had come and gone between Venice and Chicago four or five times a year. There were only two other instances of his name in official files. The first was a complaint which Durridge had made towards the end of September the previous year about an alleged trespass. The other, just over a month later, was when Franco Calderan phoned the Carabinieri to report that his employer was missing.

‘… weed fouled round the screw then …’

‘… tilt the whole issue and clean it by hand …’

‘… still swear by the little Fiat my father used …’

Zen blew an almost perfect smoke-ring towards the ceiling and called for more wine. Franco Calderan had returned from his day off on the Lido shortly after five o’clock that afternoon, the 11th. He used his own small dinghy for the crossing, and as soon as he approached the landing place he noticed that his master’s boat was absent from its mooring.

This boat, a traditional broad-beamed
topa
fitted with a Volvo diesel engine instead of the traditional lugsail, had not been seen since. Durridge never used it without Calderan aboard, having learned the hard way about the hazards of navigation on the lagoon when he ran aground south of the
Fondi dei Sette Morti
and had to spend the night aboard in the open until a fishing vessel returning to Chioggia threw him a line. Since the boat was nevertheless missing, the investigators’ assumption was that it had been taken by the same person or persons who had abducted Ivan Durridge.

As Marco Paulon had already indicated to Zen, the time frame for such a kidnapping was extremely tight. Durridge was known to have been on the island shortly after one o’clock that afternoon, since his sister had spoken to him on the phone from Florida. By two o’clock at the latest the tide would have been too low to permit embarkation or disembarkation from the
ottagono
. The possibility that the kidnappers had arrived by air was briefly considered, but ruled out because of the difficulty of landing a machine on the small patch of lawn which was the only open ground anywhere on the island, and entirely surrounded by mature trees – the Carabinieri themselves had had to come and go by boat throughout their investigation. One thing which no one questioned was that the American was a textbook target for a professional kidnapping: rich, solitary and living in isolation. All that was necesary to confirm this hypothesis was a ransom demand.

Thus far the report was quite clearly a more or less literal transcription of a file opened by the Carabinieri in Venice. The investigation was proceeding normally at local level, with no hint that the case had any further implications. Then, early in January, the Carabinieri suddenly received instructions from their superiors at the Ministry of Defence ordering them to suspend all activity relating to the Durridge case and forward any existing files and related material under seal to Rome for ‘assessment’.

The final section of the transcript consisted of selections – this was where the editing had taken place – of an internal memorandum addressed to a figure referred to only as ‘a senior official in the Defence Ministry’. It ran as follows:

With respect to the case to which you refer, a parallel agency has recently revealed a previous interest in Ivan Durridge/
which might be prejudiced by inquiries at judicial level. These have therefore been suspended in the interests of state security while the agency in question conducts its own investigation, the results of which will be communicated to all relevant parties and institutions in due course.
Well that’s that then, thought Zen, draining his glass of wine. ‘Parallel agency’ was a euphemism for the secret service organizations, in this case probably the Defence Ministry’s own SISMI unit. Whether Durridge had been their agent or their target was of no more than academic interest. Anything involving the secret services was out of his league. The most he could hope for was to massage the evidence so as to keep his private investigation going a little longer in the interests of siphoning as much money as possible out of the Durridge family. But how?

He pored over the fax again. Almost every lead seemed to have been exhausted. Eventually he spotted two possible openings. The first concerned the earlier landing on the
ottagono
, back in the summer; the other the fate of Durridge’s boat. Neither could remotely be described as promising, but by rapidly juggling them both he might manage to convey a mirage of solid progress and attainable goals to his employers, given their understandable desire to be deceived.

Back at the Questura, he set the wheels in motion. Durridge’s complaint to the police following the landing on his island in September had been duly logged at the time, and while the Carabinieri had been forced to send all their records to Rome, the Questura had received no such request for the simple reason that they had never opened a file on the Durridge case in the first place. Zen simply phoned downstairs for the relevant documents and ten minutes later they were on his desk.

To his disappointment, they seemed to offer no possibilities for fruitful exploitation and development. Not only had the three trespassers been apprehended and identified, but they were all respectable local men. Giulio Bon was from Chioggia, where he ran a boatyard. His companions lived in the city itself. Massimo Bugno was a crewhand on ACTV’s ferries and waterbuses, while Domenico Zuin owned a watertaxi.

As luck would have it, a police patrol boat had been in the area when Ivan Durridge’s complaint had been received on the 113 emergency number, and it was able to intercept the intruders as they left in a boat belonging to the said Zuin. All three protested their innocence. They had not known that the island was inhabited, assuming it to be abandoned like so many others in the lagoon. They had meant no harm, intending only to share a bottle of wine and a game of cards.

Zen got up from his desk and walked to the window. Now the fog seemed to have penetrated not just the building but also his mind, woozy from the wine. He had grown soft after years in the south, where people cut their wine with Coke and only the rich kids thought it chic to get pissed on imported beer. Back home again, he had automatically slipped back into the northern tradition, drinking a grappa with his morning coffee and then keeping a slow burn going with glasses of wine all day, but his brain could no longer handle it.

He lit a cigarette, whose smoke rubbed up against the glass like a cat, as though seeking union with the fog outside. There was nothing in the trespassing incident that he could show the Durridges’ lawyer. That left the boat. Returning to the desk, he called the office which kept records of all craft licensed to operate on waterways within the Province of Venice and asked them to send over details of any boats registered since the 1st of November previous.  

Only then, having exhausted every pretext for further delay, did he go downstairs and order a launch to take him to the Ospedale Civile and the inevitable confrontation with Ada Zulian.

If Zen had been worried that his presence at the rally of the Venetian separatist movement that evening would be in any way conspicuous, he was reassured immediately on rounding the corner into Campo Santa Margherita. With the coming of night a fidgety, fickle wind had sprung up, thinning out the fog. It was evident at a glance that the huge irregular space was awash with people.